Many people rely on medicine to help cope with ailments. For optimum efficacy, medications may need to be taken according to a specific schedule. For people who regularly take multiple different medications, it can be difficult to consistently follow the directions for all of the different medications. For instance, when a person or “subject” is supposed to take a variety of different pills at different times during the day, it may be difficult for that person to keep track of which pills need to be taken at a given time, which pills have already been taken, etc. Moreover, problems with perception (e.g., due to poor eyesight) or cognition (e.g., due to Alzheimer's disease) can substantially increase the likelihood that the subject will not properly follow the medication regimen.
In addition to tracking medication usage, it could also be useful to track many other types of activities or interaction, to provide more effective assisted living. For instance, it might be useful to track eating practices, movements within the house, etc. It could also be helpful to be able to track and distinguish activities and interactions of two or more people within the same household or living environment.
Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and readers may be used to monitor interaction between a person and an object. For instance, an RFID reader may be used to control a door lock, and a person can swipe a badge with an RFID tag near the RFID reader to unlock the door. However, since RFID readers detect proximity, they may be difficult to adapt for use in tracking medication usage. For instance, if a person were to select a pill bottle from a shelf with many other pill bottles, an RFID reader might have difficulty determining which particular pill bottle was chosen.